Re: Teaching C/C++ from Ada perspective?

[Maciej Sobczak <see.my.homepage@gmail.com>]

> What an incredibly jaw-dropping disregard of history.

On the other hand, declaring that the leading (and in some sense the only) Ada compiler is broken and that the only Ada compiler worth its name is R1000 is a jaw-dropping disregard of the present.

> It is •as if• you didn't live through the 1980s [...] you didn't live in the USA

I didn't. And I don't feel the slightest regret for this.
Let me get it straight:

You might consider C to be an ultimate disaster, especially when regarded from the Steelman perspective. But if instead of writing it by hand you generate it by means of model-based design and/or formal methods, then the requirements of Steelman are irrelevant and the language, combined with its straightforward traceability to object code [*] and the availability on all modern hardware [*], might be as well be your best bet (literally).

[*] This is a certification must-have in safety-critical systems. Don't sell me the tech that makes it any more difficult.
[**] I think about embedded systems more than PCs.

This example shows that there is more than one way to practice the art of software engineering and I don't think that any single set of requirements, written some 40 years ago, can cut it for absolutely everybody, in every possible context. This is the reason why, even at the risk of being condemned by your church, I official disregard Steelman as the only valid benchmark for measuring the usefulness of programming languages *today*.
Consistently, even though I am genuinely impressed by your historical knowledge, I disregard it, too, as the only valid metric for measuring what is the proper technology choice *today*. This thread is already much longer than it was useful for anybody reading it and since I don't see any hope of finding any common ground, I can only agree to disagree.

> AT&T-world's government-lobbying planet was bigger than DoD-world's  government-lobbying planet in the competition of ••who was eclipsing whom••

This is actually the kind of "natural selection" I was referring to.

> ‡ C++ was accreted, not designed.

In the same manner, only Ada 83 was designed. Ada 95, Ada 2005 and Ada 2012 were accreted. Some of the features were openly admitted to be borrowed from C++.

> > And, BTW, we were supposed to help the OP, who was asked to teach C++.
> 
> Oh, we are helping him very very much.  We are showing him in its full glory what a mess C++ is.

Nope. You did not show *any* single code example, in any language. I have presented code snippets in both languages to demonstrate my arguments.

> Any good teacher of C++ looking at all the replies in this thread

Anybody who was about to consider Ada and has read that:

- the leading Ada compiler is broken,
- the only Ada compiler worth its name is archaic and does not support any of the features that supposedly make Ada competitive today
- one needs 6M$ to get it
- or one needs to buy the compiler from some other company that does not even bother to inform the public that they sell it
- and so on...

(because this is all that I have "learned" in this thread)

will run away from Ada as fast as they can. There is absolutely no chance you can ever convince anybody to switch to Ada if the only thing you have on offer is the unprecedented hatred towards C++ and a point of view that seemingly got stuck several decades ago. With arguments like above, this thread has become the parody of Ada advocacy. Actually, I believe that you are making a substantial damage to Ada with that kind of arguments. I'm afraid you don't realize this.

> “Gee, I really must help my students avoid those morasses in C++.”

You did not show any morasses in C++. You have mentioned some, but I have demonstrated they exist in Ada, too. How is this going to help?

I propose to make this discussion actually concrete [***] or close it.

[***] In short: show the code.

-- 
Maciej Sobczak * http://www.inspirel.com